Abstract: The carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation problem was investigated for interleaved orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) uplink systems. A CFO estimation algorithm was proposed on the compressive sensing theory. First, a CFO estimation model was given by using the sparse property of the CFO distribution. According to compressive sensing theory, the CFO estimation problem was transformed into convex optimization problem and the optimum sparse vector was obtained via CVX. The CFOs of all users could be effectively estimated by exploiting the location of non-zero elements in the sparse vector. The presented method could avoid the eigenvalue decomposition in the subspace methods, and would be more practical. Simulation results were presented to verify the efficiency of the proposed approach.